positive Land news

China will steer local governments away from the pursuit of economic growth at all costs and beef up their powers to punish polluters as part of a campaign to reverse the damage done by three decades of unchecked expansion.

More than six million volunteers from 96 countries collected an unprecedented 100,000 tonnes of garbage last year as part of a global, web-driven clean-up campaign, cyber-environmentalists said Friday.

Switzerland’s Parliament has approved a motion banning single-use plastic shopping bags. Both houses of the Swiss Parliament Thursday voted to forbid the distribution of the plastic bags. The next step is for the government to implement the ban.

Good news for lemurs: Officials in Madagascar have created the island's biggest protected wildlife park. Named Makira Natural Park, the area is larger than the state of than the state of Rhode Island, and it provides a habitat for the highest diversity of lemurs on the planet, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Hawaii, a huge mass of plastic debris floats in the Pacific. And that’s just a fraction of the waste that’s bobbing around out there. Compared to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” one plastic soap bottle may not seem like much. But if that one bottle is mass produced by soap-maker Method, it could turn out to make a big difference.

In a case that could have broad implications, the Kichwa community of Sarayaku, Ecuador, won a major battle on July 25, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Ecuadorian government had violated its rights to communal property and cultural identity.

On Tuesday, the United Nations Education, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared the Sangha Tri-National Protected Area complex (TNS) as a World Heritage Site for its density and diversity of rainforest wildlife.

Last month ten African nations, led by Botswana, pledged to incorporate 'natural capital' into their economies. Natural capital, which seeks to measure the economic worth of the services provided by ecosystems and biodiversity—for example pollination, clean water, and carbon—is a nascent, but growing, method to curtail environmental damage and ensure more sustainable development.

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